At my current company, as an employee, I have 4 people I could call 'manager' and I'm not even talking about higher level managers and VPs.

I agree that being a 1099 hired gun can spare you from a lot of politics. It's nice to have a list of tasks the customer wants, bang them out, and walk away with a satisfied customer and a pile of money.

That said, I spent over half my career at two companies which did everything from staff augmentation to full product development. In my experience I did not detect a level of politics comparable to that at a large valley company. Granted, those companies were outside the valley and owned/run by a very smart, personable, experienced leader/engineer/salesman. It helps to do the investigative work up front and define success criteria in the initial statement of work. A lot of customers balk at paying for the upfront work, but it was a pretty firm requirement when you wanted us to take on a project. I was lucky to get hired into a design services firm early on and benefitted from the wisdom of a building full of independent contractors working for an engineering for hire company.

But, like I was getting at originally, I think it varies. There are some types of work that are hard to scope initially or where the customer exhibits child-like behavior. If you can, you can learn to identify those situations and avoid them. It helps when employment is tight and you can turn down work.

When you talk about the level of politics at the company are you talking about the internal politics dealt with by an employee or the politics dealt with my the account principal who was managing the account?

I've worked for two other consulting firms besides mine, one 150 people, one 36,000 and everyone I've talked to who managed client accounts in both those companies has similar experiences.

Sorry just incredibly curious how a company got around having to deal with politics, while doing consulting. Would make a huge difference to my current company.

Among employees at the consulting firm there were absolutely zero politics and it was by far the best crew of people I've ever worked with(author gazes wistfully off into the horizon). It was a group of very smart, somewhat cynical folks who really just concentrated on getting shit done. There wasn't a hierarchy or a career path. You were just a Senior Engineer charging by the hour. Things did get a bit weird when the owner hired a salesman to run the place for a while and he started over-promising and spending too much on marketing, but that problem sorted itself out fairly quickly.

I wasn't aware of any significant politics between us(account management, which I would say are sales, PMs, and the owner of the company) and the customers. There were political struggles inside big customers(i.e. DirecTV) when a VP would have to justify paying us, but that's not really something we got involved in. There were arguments over billing rates and such, but I wouldn't call that 'politics' it's just doing business. I consider 'politics' to be things like dog and pony shows, massaging peoples egos, playing one faction against each other, etc. There wasn't any of that.

It sounds like you were "an employee at a large/very-large consulting firm" as opposed to "1099 independent contractor one-man shop", and I would expect your experience to be the same as an employee.